President Biden on Monday signed legislation terminating the COVID-19 national emergency, which ends the economic and health protections that were set to expire next month anyway. Meanwhile, the White House is launching “Project Next Gen,” which involves $5 billion to speed up development of the next generation of COVID vaccines and therapies.
“The idea that we need next generation COVID treatments and vaccines, that the current generation is not good enough for the challenges we face, I think that animates both the title and the goal,” says Dan Diamond, national reporter investigating health politics and policy for the Washington Post. “The vaccines that have been with us these past couple of years are still providing good protection against severe disease and death, but they have not curbed COVID — far from it. And then there are many … immunocompromised, elderly Americans who don't have as many tools to protect them because the virus has evolved and challenged what we have available.”
One of Project Nex Gen’s project’s three goals is to create a universal COVID vaccine. But Diamond says that that’s unlikely to happen. He points to a past initiative to make a universal flu vaccine that was funded, but has yet to come to fruition.
While other countries, such as India and China, are also developing a new vaccine, Diamond says it’s better for the U.S. to make and own the product than wait to buy it from abroad.
Will $5 billion be enough for Project Next Gen — especially when looking back at Operation Warp Speed, which got about $18 billion?
White House officials say it’s sufficient, and there’s an argument that Warp Speed got so much funding because it was supposed to make the shots as quickly as possible, Diamond explains. But he acknowledges that the new project could continue for years and need more money, especially as the U.S. wants to make a vaccine for viruses that we don’t yet know about.
It’s still unclear whether there is full, bipartisan support for Project Next Gen. Diamond points to the so-called cycle of panic and neglect, where people overwhelmingly respond at the onset of a crisis, then eventually ignore all the risk factors.
“The White House had asked Congress for more than a year, ‘Give us billions of dollars. We want to make this investment.’ There were some Republicans sympathetic to that. But also said, ‘Look, we've already funded all this money before in COVID relief. Certainly you have some left over.’ And I guess the White House was able to find money after all, but the idea that this is a unifying push — it's very different in 2023 than in 2020.”
